In March, on the day after my birthday, I sat in the back of the room of my yoga teacher training in Bali, and I wept. Uncontrollably. For hours.
All month I had been feeling like I didn't belong in the space. Passing remarks, judgmental looks, and the sense that I was the subject of conversation when I wasn't around, threaded through every day of the training, leaving my nervous system on high alert. And when the facilitators celebrated other birthdays but forgot mine, it validated my feeling that I wasn't welcome.
"I don't want to be somewhere I am not wanted," I whispered tearfully to another woman in the training when she tried to console me.
She told me that I did belong, but the words felt hollow on the heels of three weeks of actions that made me feel anything but.
Was I misreading the signals? Or was I receiving an expression of regret in response to my vulnerability?
Why We Long to Belong
Belonging is a core human need, according to psychologist Abraham Maslow. His pioneering framework places it right in the middle of a hierarchy of needs that humans must satisfy in order to move up the pyramid to self-actualization. He posits that once a human meets their physiological needs like food and sleep, and safety needs like financial security and health, then they seek love and belonging.
From a survival perspective, belonging matters a great deal. We depended on acceptance by our tribes in order to be included in resource sharing – like food and water – as well as protection from threats, environmental and social. This need for belonging is coded into our cells, and is why our nervous systems get activated when we get negative comments on the internet, or criticized at work – even if our survival is no longer in jeopardy.
What Creates Belonging
Most well-intentioned people set out to create spaces where people feel like they belong – whether at work or at events. And yet, so many of us enter these environments and feel like an outsider. Why does this happen?
Creating a space where people feel like they belong involves modeling and even codifying behaviors that reinforce belonging rather than conditionality. Here are some questions for self-evaluation:
- When someone voices their perspective, how is it received?
- What are the stated values of the group, and is there integrity in the way that the leaders exhibit those values in their own behavior?
- How are mistakes – at every level of the hierarchy – handled? Is there transparency, ownership, and compassion?
- Do individuals feel a sense of agency? Are boundaries at the individual and group level honored?
- How is support given? Is it equitable? How can members who might be afraid of repercussions for asking for support be better supported?
- If someone doesn't feel like they belong, or is having a conflict with another member of the group, are there established, retribution-free pathways for conflict resolution?
If you have to tell people that they belong – that "this is a space where everyone is welcome" – chances are there's a disconnect between what you're saying and what you're doing. True belonging doesn't need to be stated.
Each month, paid subscribers get to join a community call to talk about the topics of the newsletter and how it applies to your life, as well as to experience meditation and other somatic practices that you can integrate into your day to day. This month we're going to talk about belonging, and navigating spaces where we don't always feel it. Upgrade to join us! This is a space where everyone is welcome. 😉
The Connection Between C-PTSD and Belonging
Feeling like you don't belong anywhere can be a symptom of C-PTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder). When your feelings were consistently not honored, when attention or affection from your caregivers was conditional on your behavior, or when you learned that in order to avoid being bullied or criticized, you had to make yourself small and agreeable, you learned that belonging was something you had to earn. You didn't get to exist and feel safe. You had to learn what the rules of safety were in the space you were in, and then look for the signal that you met the requirement.
As an adult, that echoes into the spaces you enter into by keeping you hyper-vigilant, feeling like an outsider, policing your own behavior, and keeping yourself distant. The problem is that vulnerability is what creates intimacy and acceptance. You are inadvertently making yourself an outsider by not letting yourself risk being truly seen.
Clara Ritger
Related Read: In this post I share more about the impact of C-PTSD and trauma on the body and how it shapes our experience of life.
What To Do When You Feel Like You Don't Belong
But how do you know whether you are repeating past trauma, or whether you actually don't belong?
First, notice whether something about the space you are in feels different from other spaces you have been in. Do you always feel like you don't belong? Or do you feel like you don't belong here? What evidence do you have for feeling like you don't belong? Write it down. Once it is on the page ask yourself: Is this objectively true? How do I know it is true?
Second, notice how your body feels when you enter and exit the space. What signals are you receiving somatically? When have you felt these signals before? Is there something about this space that is familiar to the past space where you received these signals? Or is there a boundary that you have around the way people behave that you're now realizing is out of integrity in this space?
Third, decide what you are going to do with this information. If you feel like you don't belong, but this exercise has revealed that actually, you might be having a trauma response, how are you going to honor those feelings, while allowing yourself to soften into the space?
And if you feel like you don't belong because you actually don't, are you going to leave? Are you going to stay? Why/why not? Reconnect to your purpose for being in the space, and then take the best course of action for you. Sometimes that might mean letting go of the need to belong in every space in order to get what you came for. Other times, that might mean leaving and letting yourself go where you feel like you belong.
Feel Belonging Within
If you've been reading this and recognizing your own pattern — shape-shifting to fit in, doubting your body's signals, staying in rooms that make you feel uncomfortable — I work with a small number of people 1:1 to help you build the self-awareness to trust what you're perceiving, and the tools to regulate your nervous system when you're in spaces that don't feel safe.
If that resonates, reply to this email, or drop me a line at hello [at] adventuretoawaken [dot] com and we'll explore whether it's a good fit.
How To Cultivate Belonging With Yourself
I spent decades abandoning myself while I shape-shifted to become a person who belonged. The problem with this approach is that even if you manage to accomplish the goal – becoming someone else, and fitting in – it just reinforces the idea that you, as you truly are, don't belong. And now, you don't even belong to yourself.
Choosing to be yourself, even if it means not belonging in the group, is how you start to cultivate belonging with yourself. As you move in and out of spaces while being yourself, eventually you will find a space where you belong.
Being yourself when you've become comfortable putting on masks in social situations can be hard. It means accepting the parts of yourself that you deemed undesirable – or that were often rejected by your family, or in early social situations as a child – and hid away in order to be accepted.
If that feels scary and hard, start by expanding the part of yourself that feels more exciting and easier to accept. What do you enjoy? What inspires you? What ignites your creativity? What makes your life feel meaningful? Go and do those things. When you start to build your muscle for your unique sense of fun and play, you grow your capacity to carry the unique parts of yourself that feel hurt, heavy, and left out.
Meet the core human needs that you are seeking from group belonging – food, sleep, meaning, play – and you can feel belonging without needing acceptance from every group you find yourself in.
As you spend more time with yourself, you might start to notice that there is an inner dialogue that has been controlling the way that you show up in life – and that it hasn't been very kind. Remember that you are worthy of the same compassion and love that you extend to a friend. Thank this dialogue for its efforts to protect you, and intentionally start to rewrite its criticisms into encouragement.
How To Know When You Belong
Belonging is a felt sense of safety. Every body is different, but it might look like this: your shoulders drop, your heart opens, your breathing slows, you stop scanning for threats.
What it isn't is people telling you that you belong – especially when your body tells you otherwise.
Being told you belong when you don't is a form of gaslighting that asks you to override your own accurate perception. This happens in spiritual communities, workplaces, families — anywhere the group has an investment in you accepting the narrative that the environment is safe when it isn't.
It's important to cultivate a relationship with your body and the way it speaks to you, and honor those signals, in order to discern whether it's you, or the environment. This is hard, especially for people with C-PTSD, who learned early on to override their intuition in order to survive in an environment where their body was accurately telling them they weren't safe.
Having C-PTSD means your nervous system is more sensitive than most people's. But sensitive doesn't mean wrong. A smoke detector that goes off easily isn't malfunctioning when there's actual smoke. If you're having a trauma response, your detector would go off all of the time. Does it?
And even then, you're human, and if you're like me, you might still fall into the trap of doubting yourself, even when you're right. It took entering a space where I did feel like I belonged for me to realize: Oh, I wasn't wrong.
It's easier said than done, but sometimes you have to honor that your body is telling you that you don't belong, and trust that your body will tell you again when you find a space where you do.
A few months ago, I wrote about the beauty of tribal living, sharing the story of my time in the Amazon, and wondering whether in the push for industrialization, we lost a way of life that was easier to find meaning and joy in, and ultimately better for our survival.
But now I want to share the story of what happens when you find yourself in a tribe where you don't belong.
I was bullied in my yoga teacher training in Bali.
